Castle Rock. Director Peter Yates; Producer Peter Yates, Nigel Wooll; Screenplay William Goldman; Camera Roger Pratt; Editor Ray Lovejoy; Music Hummie Mann; Art Director Anthony Pratt
Penelope Ann Miller
Timothy Daly
Louis Jourdan
Art Malik
Ian Richardson
Ian McNeice
Harvested from the same field as Romancing the Stone, this wine-soaked comedy-adventure never really ferments, in part due to a lack of chemistry between its romantic leads. William Goldman's first original script since Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and his first collaboration with director Peter Yates since the 1972 Hot Rock, the film's problems begin with its title, a reference to the vintage of an invaluable 150-year-old bottle of wine that sounds more like a sci-fi thriller.
That bottle brings together a wine auctioneer's daughter (Penelope Ann Miller), who discovers it, and a Texan millionaire's troubleshooter (Tim Daly), assigned to bring it back to his boss. Unfortunately, Miller has the bad luck of finding the bottle in a Scottish castle where a trio of researchers, led by Louis Jourdan, are inconveniently torturing a scientist to obtain a secret formula, putting them in pursuit of the bottle.
Miller finds herself stranded by Goldman's screenplay, in which her character is a little bit of everything (spinster, repressed, ambitious) yet nothing in particular. Daly doesn't fare much better as a dapper leading man, who proves full of surprises.
(Color) Widescreen. Available on VHS, DVD. Extract of a review from 1992. Running time: 89 MIN.
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